PATRICIA PICCININI

The first major publication on Patricia Piccinini, one of Australia’s most celebrated artists ever since her Young Family exhibition caused a sensation at the 1993 Venice Biennale. Piccinini creates an imaginative world peopled with families of charming and slightly unsettling beings. There are mutants who are half human and half beast, baby trucks and humanized scooters, sentient lumps of flesh and delicious bits of car. This book reproduces and discusses all Piccinini’s major works.

TIM MAGUIRE

Tim Maguire paints images of overwhelming beauty. His works are frequently cinematic in scale and distinctive for their rich colouration and technical skill. Paintings hover between realism and abstraction. The texts are by two leading art historians plus a personal response by Cate Blanchett to one of her favourite artists.

BILL HENSON

Hardback, 24.5 x 32.5 cm 501 pages
ISBN 978-3039390038
Published by Scalo in association with Art Gallery of New South Wales
First Edition 2005

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 January – 3 April, 2005; and at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 April – 10 July, 2005.

BRENT HARRIS

Publication to coincide with the Brent Harris exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2012. Brent Harris is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. A prolific painter and printmaker, he is well known for haunting imagery that drifts between abstraction and figuration. Charged with a quiet emotional intensity, his paintings, prints and drawings are often motivated by an exploration of personal memories and the expression of psychological states. Sometimes humorous and often disturbing, they address a range of universal concerns relating to human experience: life, death, fear, doubt, spirituality and sexuality. Encompassing more than 70 works drawn predominantly from the NGV Collection, this exhibition looks at the development of Harris’s unique vision over a career of more than twenty years, exploring the ways that he has continually transformed his approach to image-making from his earliest prints and drawings to his most recent paintings.

Holding a Thread is the first monograph on Benjamin Armstrong (born 1975 in Melbourne, Australia) and is lavishly illustrated with examples of his most remarkable work from the past ten years. In her essay, Juliana Engberg states that his works are ‘about a kind of trauma of looking’. This act of viewing is also explored in the conversation between Charlotte Day and the artist, as is the influence of literature and the functionality of art and its role in other (non-Western and ancient) cultures.

ROSEMARY LAING

The first comprehensive monograph on the prominent Australian artist Rosemary Laing displays the full range of her photographic art.

“Unquiet” is a word often used to describe the photographs of Rosemary Laing. Usually presented in a landscape format, suspended midway between fantasy and reality, her images render the impossible possible. Laing achieves this not through digital manipulation, but through her ingenious use of perspective and lighting. Her works often appear in series, and this volume surveys these series: from the witty and beautiful “flight research” and the alarming “a dozen useless actions for grieving blondes” to the hallucinogenic “groundspeed” and others. Lavishly illustrated, this book allows the photographs of this popular artist to be appreciated in the fullness of their warmth and eloquence, theatricality and imagination.